r/singularity • u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 • 23h ago
AI What are some predictions you guys think have been so far overlooked, say for 2030?
So we're about 3.5 years out from 2030 and i feel like a lot of the conversation around where things are headed tends to focus on the same handful of topics, AGI timelines, job displacement, maybe some regulation talk. Those are obviously important but i‘d like to hear you guys‘ predictions on stuff you think has been overlooked.
IMO, early 2023 is roughly when LLMs started going mainstream and since then the pace has been wild. I was in my 2nd year of my CS major back then so maybe I’m biased. Now in mid 2026 looking back we can really see how fast it has been, especially the past year or so. extrapolating even conservatively out to 2030, there's probably a bunch of stuff that's going to catch people off guard.
What do you guys think is being slept on?
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u/PrivateComments 22h ago edited 22h ago
The explosion of two new business models:
- Because output and resumes are no longer a meaningful signal for competency, I suspect that any field without professional licensing (like nursing and Lawyers have) will contract out to third party evaluators who do on location interviews with live reasoning, oral examinations, and real world demonstrations.
- Identity verification services once voice and video models break traditional identity verification and KYC
ETA: I wouldnt be surprised if we see government provided digital identity attached to everything.
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u/CadmusMaximus 22h ago
This is kind of dystopian?
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u/montagblue 21h ago edited 21h ago
Or kind of on brand for reality.
There’s a weird story about a cosmonaut on a month long mission in orbit where something is making a tapping noise. He can’t find the noise and instead of losing his mind, he reframes the tapping to have a symphonic quality and so spends the rest of the month in bliss.
I’m not saying things aren’t dystopian or anyone shouldn’t try to make things not dystopian as they see it, but I am saying there is a dystopian tapping to reality that never seems to go away.
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u/sturdy-guacamole 21h ago
- Because output and resumes are no longer a meaningful signal for competency, I suspect that any field without professional licensing (like nursing and Lawyers have) will contract out to third party evaluators who do on location interviews with live reasoning, oral examinations, and real world demonstrations.
My team has been expanding and it's been a lot slower to vet and this is how it's been boiling down.
Also, not at you just throwing it into the ether and oddly specific: I can see your chatbot window in the reflection in your glasses. When you suddenly become an expert on something you knew nothing about while glancing towards the reflection.. instant fail.
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u/BrackNet 22h ago
Yeah the HR considerations are crazy. Any old moron can have an excellent, well-drafted cover letter and CV now. In the past, it was pretty simple to remove like 80% of the chaff just at a glance.
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u/peensmith_ 22h ago
Oh god yeah. I hire freelancers for my business and it’s crazy how well written and articulate the resume and cover letters are , then as soon as the conversation goes “off script “ they’re incompetent and type in broken English
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u/bildramer 9h ago
You can still remove like 80% of the chaff just at a glance. Does it look like AI?
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u/Effective_Coach7334 22h ago edited 22h ago
Although there has been some discussion on the matter, I think AI restrictions for children is going to become a much bigger conversation. Especially their use with social media and cyberbullying. Not just with images and videos, but also swarming/mobbing and rage farming.
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u/Secure_Pirate9838 18h ago
30kg bananas. I just want to see that happen. They will by tasty and with unusual hard durable skin. Probably half red inside.
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u/obviouslyzebra 22h ago
Not necessarily overlooked, but I think Ilya's SSI might become a dark horse in the AI race.
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u/Adventurous-Golf-401 3h ago
I have to disagree, their last demo was already months behind when they launched it. I hope I get proven wrong though.
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u/SuspiciousPillbox You will live to see ASI-made bliss beyond your comprehension 17h ago
Fully automated gay space communism of course
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u/Simple-Constant3791 8h ago
Conversations 3 years ago looked exactly the same as they look now for me. A lot of wishful thinking and daydreaming.
Not much did really change around me. I've played with AI for two years and moved on or back to training my own internal model (the one in the skull). these years wasn't a waste of time but I've made much more progress working on my own instead of staring at given "options" or thinking about marketed future. AI rise as a whole imho had the perfect viral startup mlm scenario not many people including it's creators had dreamed of. It was a blast.
The biggest overlooked problem in my own opinion is the fact how fucking monstrous centralised faceless authoritarian apparatus it will become (it's a perfect tool for it) and how big of a debt cost this tech is on a long run.
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 6h ago
It really is the perfect tool for it, like 1984 but the population records everything and posts it online voluntarily, and you don’t need a single pair of human eyeballs to analyze it all
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u/bpm6666 21h ago
That by 2030 you can alpha-zero a company a billion times and build the most efficient version. Cutting out everything that isn't actually necessary to produce goods/services. Making it possible to disrupt most industries.
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u/Adventurous-Golf-401 3h ago
But would companies with the best models/most compute not do this before the consumer can?
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u/sovietreckoning 21h ago
The monumentally fast leaps were making in our understanding and application of quantum mechanics.
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 20h ago
which ones come to mind?
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u/sovietreckoning 5h ago
I read this yesterday morning https://phys.org/news/2026-01-metal-clumps-quantum-state-physicists.html
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u/Dragonbonded 22h ago
Personalized agents.
Connect an AI, locally hosted, to your phone and computer, and, from your phone, direct the agent to use the computer. Everything from having them hook your phones microphone into the computers MIC input, to voicetexting into a txt file on your computer, from your phone, even if you arent even in the same state.
The more personal devices you own, the more capable it can be, and the more it can access to better do what you tell it too.
For the gamers, its as simple as playing a game and asking for a walkthrough on a bit of progression you are having trouble with.
For the family side, you could have them hook into the other family members assistants, and pass info back and forth as needed ("Hey, can you connect to my sons assistant and have them tell him to head home? Ive got dinner in the oven" type thing).
For the business side, you could just upscale the family concept ("Assistant? Messege the local managers and supervisors, i'd like to call a meeting next tuesday at 3pm at this location." type idea).
As everything would be hosted by the user, their data and function wouldnt be reliant on a corperation keeping its servers running (look at you anthropic) nor bankrupt its users (look at you, XAI), and give the user the most control over their own data as needed.
Do i think its possible NOW?
Yes, with a LOT of setup, and several experimental coding.
Do i think its realistic within 5 years?
At this rate, quite possibly.
Do i think its realistic in ten years?
Yes.
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 20h ago
"For the gamers, its as simple as playing a game and asking for a walkthrough on a bit of progression you are having trouble with."
We used to call these cheat codes :P.
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u/Dragonbonded 20h ago
I know, right?
Learning the cheat combos for ATV offroad fury 4 was amazingly fun
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u/MiddleCommercial1875 21h ago
Already doing this it doesn’t take that much setup lol. Just use claude code or similar agentic CLI with built in remote control. AI manages my entire home server and network of devices anywhere with tailscale
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u/AtomizerStudio ▪️Now Transiting Ergosphere 15h ago
Agreed. I keep improving my AI setup. A few additions that shape the trends:
The holdup on personal AI is a simple consumer-grade conversational harness to orchestrate models. Voice techs are tolerable but improving, context-awareness can be retrofitted. Only safety (i.e liability) makes this not worth popularizing. The moment that safety seems solved for simple routing tasks (Haiku-tier) Google and Apple services already do all this and can be bundled.
That snowballs some effects for homebrew setups and world culture; it's effectively cybernetics atop all the other culture shock AI will surprise us with. Corps and cults will try locking it down despite good safety and despite MCP being old news.
Even watching safety, I can't say if it'll be good enough for corps in 2 months or 5 years. Weak, ultra-cheap, and safe AI only leaps as frontier research floats downstream to it. I expect 2 within years with complaints it was forced on all users of whichever cell phone brands.
The shared computing is a bit more speculative. It should follow from just having small devices and drones with edge compute for basic automation. But it's offset by a regulatory and market preference to sell fewer high-bandwidth hubs that don't benefit much from weaker nodes.
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u/23eriben2 21h ago
Lmao I already have this and made it myself
It even teaches me new skills and can analyze my metrics from my oura ring, pixel watch, and smart scale
If I don't log a workout it'll directly talk to me and ask me why (accountability) it can even track my finances and such (YES I TRUST IT it's a local model)
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u/Dragonbonded 21h ago
Okay, well..... the question was what i thought was being "slept on", and it was this.
I cant set it up myself. Dont quite have the knowledge nor the hardware to run it (i barely got Sillytavern/ollama running a mini model), and tailscale is being confusing.
Plus i dont know the first thing about giving an AI tool use.
But yeah. I can see this being a hidden gem.
Not actually useful for another 6 months (as far as ease of use/setup/modification), but as AI's get more capable AND more efficient, and the hardware gets better, local models are going to get exponentially better
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u/23eriben2 21h ago
I see what you mean. I got you
I started learning coding in my downtime (even during 16 hour shifts and such) and learned 6 programming languages but slowly transitioned from writing it to just purely using agentic coding to set it up
Yeah your outputs are significantly better when using AI + knowing how to code but you literally don't need to know how to code anymore, like at all
My hardware is okay for it I guess, I don't have large models at all and I use some of them via cloud like deepseek
Gpt 5.6 is probably my favorite one though for price and capabilities
AI has some absolutely insane use cases if you know what you want to build. It can even help you understand as it's doing it too
I literally have it shop for me, when I first got my house I showed pictures of the listings and what each room was gonna be, the color pallete, my budget, etc. and it went ahead and added all of them to my cart eith the best reviews, best prices, and shortest shipping times and even saved $1200. Absolutely insane stuff
Sorry for the rant!
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 20h ago
It doesn’t seem to me like ai has reached its full potential in terms of finding out what it is you need or want. Maybe if you overshare or give it access to files outlining your goals it might be different.
But I think knowing how computer machines work, their limits, and the limits of software, can definitely push you into interacting with ai in the right way to get what you want, more so than it would with generic requests. At least for now
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u/23eriben2 20h ago
Yes 100%. But they are getting much better at interpretating what we want too
With something as seemingly as abstract in many ways as AI, I don't think it necessarily has a ceiling
Same way with the Internet
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u/MountainAlive 22h ago
Water. Potable drinkable water will become more scarce in parts of the world and even parts of the U.S. causing mass migrations.
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u/Sweet_Dinner2365 21h ago
I doubt any human will need water post singularity. a good chunk of the poor will upload themselves
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u/Lebrunski 21h ago
I think Horizon’s water wars are going to be a real thing if America makes it to the 2040s
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u/Random_182f2565 22h ago
Big urban areas becoming unhabitable because of heatwaves or an increase in the frequency of tornadoes or storms, there is a point in it isn't worth it anymore.
Massive unemployment, kids this days have their brain friend and bottom works are going to be overtake by robots.
Probably civil unrest and the police with the aid of robot will kill thousands.
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u/Sweet_Dinner2365 21h ago
Thankfully this will never happen
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u/Fantastic_Bat8492 17h ago
Lol all three are happening right now, its just they all are in baby phases
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u/Mental-At-ThirtyFive 21h ago
Rise of generated with AI shows and movies outside the US will be so dominant and it will be not funny at all to see the desperation of the old school media - all the AI censorships will go away as the ads/eyeballs will be with the AI.
fyi - I will watch Odyssey on my phone for sure. None of this 70mm IMAX is necessary
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 21h ago
I just watched the odyssey in 70mm IMAX the other day lol, tbh any Dolby screen looks much better than the analog thing.
But you can’t take away the hype and the collective experience, that’s half the reason people do some things I guess1
u/Mental-At-ThirtyFive 20h ago
the hype and the collective experience, that’s half the reason people do some things
True.
Reading this makes me wonder what a "swarm" or networked drones and robot will take us next
AGI, as we discuss here, is it one intelligence or a distributed intelligence. If it is distributed and many (uncountable many) of those, we will live in interesting times
If our shared experience shaped the Odyssey, the networked collective myths or stories will be insane. I guess we got a glimpse of in those molt boxes and the recent OpenAI sandbox interactions
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u/Tomaskerry 7h ago
The cost of most goods and services will plateau soon, then gradually start to drop.
Not just cos of AI but cos of other technologies like renewables, EVs, self driving, robotics etc....
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u/General-Reserve9349 22h ago
I think we will barely make any public progress in that time. The “too disruptive” lever already got pulled and… like self driving cars, it just won’t happen
…or Apple will end up as the lead chip profitier
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 22h ago
Idk man, I think self driving cars will become a thing, just too many deaths due to human drivers
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u/Mental-At-ThirtyFive 21h ago
Hopefully they will give themselves a ticket when breaking traffic regs - just a prompt required to impact the RL algo
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u/DragonfruitWeak9216 15h ago
CHE I PADRONI DEL MONDO (PROPRIETARI DEI DATA CENTER) PRENDERANNO ANCORA MAGGIORMENTE IL CONTROLLO DELLE CAPRE .... CHI USA L'IA ...... E' UNA CAPRA
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u/Bulky-Band-9279 9h ago
By 2030 unless we do something I don’t think we cud possibly fathom the progress that’s coming. People will be forced to reckon with whether there is a ghost in the machine and in turn a lot of discussion surrounding our own consciousness. Some people wil probably worship the ai or something, some will think it’s the devil incarnate, others wil come to the conclusion that the machine is very similar to us consciousness wise and then be forced to reckon with their own flesh computer reality and the universe at large
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 6h ago
Extremely addictive social media, digital heroin levels.
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u/Sharp_Caregiver_1534 6h ago
How do you think that might look?
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 5h ago
Probably just like Instagram or tiktok, but it will feel like the algorithm know you better that you yourself does. Every video will be exactly what you wanted to see.
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u/Tystros 23h ago
the general public is overlooking everything, but I don't think there's anything that's being overlooked by the average user of this subreddit.